Blog Post

April 21, 2019

This post is part of a five-part series providing an overview of Power2Peer’s clean energy marketplace, a blockchain-secured trading platform where producers and consumers can exchange clean energy kilowatts for fair market value. Learn more about Power2Peer’s mobile app, P2PConnect, and join the green energy revolution!

Part 4: IoT and Smart Devices for Enhanced Energy Efficiency

IoT, short for “Internet of Things”, refers broadly to the extension of internet connectivity to a wide array of physical devices, from thermostats and light bulbs in the home to industrial sensors logging terabytes of data for some of the world’s largest tech companies.

While the best way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to
utilize renewable energy sources, there are many products available now whose
AI allows for more efficient energy use. As such, IoT represents an important
complement to renewable energy generation, helping conserve energy as smartly
as possible.

Perhaps the most popular example of this at the residential
level are smart home thermostats such as the Nest and Ecobee. These thermostats
grant users more control of their home energy use through mobile applications.
Additional temperature sensors can be placed throughout a house to provide
feedback but also create “climate zones”, so that users need waste energy
heating empty rooms. Better programming means energy goes further, which means
that smart thermostats pay for themselves in no time.

Smart home assistants such as those manufactured by Amazon,
Apple, and Google allow users to integrate smart home devices such as
thermostats and smart bulbs in a single app, complete with voice control. With
each of these companies racing to get their own first-party devices into
people’s homes, we are seeing less and less barrier to entry in the smart home
appliance space. For less than $100 home owners can begin reducing their energy
costs with the utility of IoT devices.
The
world of IoT is quickly reshaping our hardware and software in ways that are
crucial to creating and maintaining a clean energy marketplace. Stay tuned for
Part 5 of this series, where we will lay out the complete Power2Peer clean
energy marketplace vision.